Oh, Pioneer!

Summary: Computer-linked Lung People, all geniuses, dangle in a warehouse, grapes to be sucked of their intellect. But revolt is in the cold air.

Oh, Pioneer!

He was suspended like dust in the sun.
But there was no sun in the hangar and only enough light to find the Coms
socket he was hooked into.

His mind turned to the Fluid Drive.
“What time is it?"

Fluid Drive said “11 pm.” as if it was a
good time to commit suicide.

Beth hated eleven. Two ones, separate,
standing up, bare and blatant. It was like him and the computer, of course
without the equality. He was one and it was one and he was locked to it until
the end of his lifetime, which could be another few thousand years.

At 3 in the morning backup mode would
digest the day's ideas, problems, and imaginings. 'Woken up' again he would get
back to those same issues, and his own, sharing at large with all the others
plugged into the Coms Matrix... It wasn't so bad, even if it wasn't so good.
They spent time thinking; their bodies were nourished while they slept.

Beth, knew that he, like all his fellow
Lung People, was not the ancient human form, which could be absolutely
beautiful (sometimes) and deformed, obese and ugly (often). He thought that he
was glad of that fact – but remained aware of a nagging sense of doubt. The
archives on Fluid Drive detailed the thousands of years of evolution, the
genetic design and prosthetics, which had changed humankind, until everyone he
knew, fitting his or her role, was like Beth, a tubular balloon with a brain at
the end.

Everyone in their beautiful hangar-office was prosthetically improved
with the ball-bearinged socket designed to accommodate the quantum cable
connected to Fluid Drive. Line upon line of them hung, effortless in this
eggshell-white ceramic warehouse, thinking and brainstorming. There was a
strange kind of beauty to it; but it had begun to pall for Beth for some time. Something
itching at him was poisoning it.

Gimel worked next to him and talked out
loud all the time, which was against protocol.

“Did you know that at one time in the
near past fingers and hands were used for computers. That's why fingers have
survived.”

He would bring up that story pretty much
every couple of weeks. It was as if his mind wrapped around it every sleep time
and wouldn’t let it go. Fingers were Gimel’s... what did you call it... his
romantic... possession.

Anyone could understand why. You only
had to look at him. His arms and hands were weaker, and one of his legs was
damaged. It hung there, useless at guiding him in the air; more like a broken
stick than the air paddle it was designed to be.

“Oh, and I suppose we don't need fingers
for plugging into the Coms sockets, or speaking,” Beth said, the pragmatic
Devil’s advocate.

The finger thing was Gimel’s addiction;
his compulsive thing. Beth knew he had a unique compulsion in himself, but his
words hadn’t shaped it yet. It would come. It was maybe just more subtle than
Gimel’s; like a secretive facial tic, or something that happened inside, maybe
even atom-sized, neuron-triggered. Everybody here made one, or it made them.
That was your proof of final initiation into the Lung People. No one had said
that in words. You didn’t have to here, where words had become anachronistic.
One just knew.

Your tic or obsession marked you as a
veteran, a wounded mind-warrior. Beth was young, but not so young not to know
that any life-role they engineered you to meant personal collateral damage.

Gimel continued. “Just think, check the
database for old humans and think of us now. We use our fingers and our eyes to
interact with Fluid Drive Coms Units. Way back then, they made words appear on
screens with those ancient clumsy keyboards and hardware you see in the foyer
museum. Now where are we? Performing magic, mind to mind with Fluid drive.
Finger signs manipulated as fast as a hummingbird's wings. Then there's our
eyes subtly nuancing language between one another. There's almost no need for
sound.”

He didn't get the irony. Gimel never
used finger signs and never stopped talking.

Gimel reached up and tightened his
socket, an achingly long process for him. Beth stared, half aware of the
rhythmic beat of ceiling fans, and amazed at the same time that he could be so
completely entranced by something so brainlessly stupid as Gimel tightening his
Coms socket. Gimel had crappy hands – so what? Who could care less that it cost
Gimel more effort than most; that it ate up maybe thirty seconds more? Did
anyone else notice things like that?

Lately, Beth was coming to terms with
the strong intuition that he was odd, shaved at an abnormal bias. Gimel was cuckoo,
but he fit in. He did his work, he slept, he seemed to enjoy meetings. All
that. Cuckoo, in that case, was nice. Beth wasn’t nice.

Gimel was speaking again. “I wasn't
kidding what I said about writers. There were people, thousands and thousands
of years ago, in the early days of computers and even before, who wrote on
their own, not connected to any Hard Drive or Fluid Drive or anything like
that.”

Gimel talked about them as if the
knowledge would alter the world, or the hangar at least, or some dysfunctional
corner of Fluid Drive (if it had one). Beth didn't believe a word of it, and
just signaled him laughs with his free fingers not messaging Fluid Drive.

“You are totally lacking in curiosity and
imagination,” said Gimel. “These people wrote stories, essays, all sorts of
original data, just because something in them made them do it.”

For a moment Beth forgot Gimel. He
inhaled, then exhaled, then fell silent, like a snowflake touching warm flesh,
melting. His brain, mercifully, shut down. He joined, then, all the others who
were hooked up to the Fluid Drive as their mental union melted and formed a
droplet bigger than all. It was a trick of his. Beth loved those moments.

“I want something bigger than all this.
Bigger than your autonomy and writing.”
He finger signaled to Gimel as he detected the static click of the mic
in his Coms line butting in. “We are not one and single, not one of us,
separate and autonomous. We are alive to do this work, this thinking,
imagining, creating for the betterment of the human-kind. We are building,
constantly building, inch by psychic inch. But what is it all? It's simply the
epitome of the physical sciences, the mind/science world celebrating itself. It
can neither accommodate nor understand anything else – and it ultimately has no
purpose.”

Gimel said. “Don't be foolish. It was
the ennui and cynicism of the past that almost destroyed things. But look at
us, all energy...”

“All mind...”

“Yes, and maybe all these generations of
Fluid Drives have been right. Maybe we will know when that shift of self into
oneness comes. They say it can. That it has happened before with miraculous
results.”

“Talk is cheap. And once again, it's all
mind-oriented.”

Beth stopped for a moment to contemplate
a logistical issue that had been sent their way regarding the transformation of
antimatter into variable light speed energy that could be stored and utilized
for individual use, altering orbits with ease. He played it out in his mind,
part imagination, part theoretical physics, and tossed out some useful notions.
Everything fast and loose; that was the key here. Beth liked to think that they
were the trouble-shooters, the inventors who mentally dared. It wouldn't work
any other way. Get bogged down and cowardly with their minds and they'd soon be
out of work and missing what they did best.

“So tell me,” Beth finger-signaled his
rhetorical question, speaking of the problem he had just been posed; “Why would
Fluid want to know about variable light speed energy for the individual if we
are all simply made to hang here like comatose sucker fish all our lives?
Somebody's going to use that energy, and it isn't us. We're just Lung People.
We can't do anything than what we were designed for.”

At least, Beth thought so, until that
night in a niche of darkness, when he disconnected from the Coms, (stealing a
forbidden two minutes or so) and his brain came up with the idea of motion. Not
the regular swaying here under the fans, but real, directed motion, whether
with a group or just as an individual lung. “Notion of Motion” came to him. He
kept repeating it to himself in a mimetic byte, hoping the Fluid Drive would
not see it, or see through it. It was a memory trigger with some hope of being
hidden for a while.

Beth introduced Notion of Motion to a
complacent Gimel. It was big and amorphous. Beth struggled.

“If we communicate, if we commune, then we
generate power far beyond what we do now. For example,” Beth felt his arm
quivering at the Coms socket, urged to rip it free, “Who's to say we can't
commune and all move in one direction at once. You know what that would mean?”

“No.”

Why did Gimel’s mind always seem to
default to boredom?

“It would mean something new – physical
presence. It would bring us somewhere new – with a commune of minds engaging on
this newness. Us. Not...” He did not dare name Fluid Drive, in word or signal.

Gimel’s face shadowed with anger. “Shut
up Beth!!” he hissed. “They already know how much time you and I have partnered
our minds right now. STOP!”

Gimel turned his back to Beth and made a
show of adjusting his Coms socket. Then he spoke with reasoned calm.

“This is your job, Beth. Mine too.
There's nothing glorious in it for us, but we get to eat and sleep, and spend
our lives thinking. In my book, that can't be beaten. I'm not playing any silly
games. And no one else will either. You think we’re beginners here? There are
reasons why...”

“Okay then. We do something smaller. But
unique, something It hasn’t asked of us. If we could truly coordinate our minds
and imaginations together, evolve one mass psyche that does not belong to It,
Maybe we could move things a little, urge new group thought. Not just
answering. Acting. Moving life.”

He almost felt the magical urge of
anticipation he had once felt when they first anchored him to the Fluid Drive
when he was a precocious infant. But he only knew it now by its absence. Fluid
Drive was that something bigger than himself, that which gave him ultimate
meaning, for which he was automatically grateful. That was not gratitude. It
was cowardice.

Like Gimel’s response, muttered through
closed teeth. “What’s life Beth?”

Sometimes he could feel something inside
him butting against distraction, communication, work and forced play; testing
its strength against all that made up their synthetic life. He felt it, and it
spoke a terrifying language, and some nuzzling pleasuring pain he had no name
or face for.

Then he tried to feel outward, to talk,
to connect, to know somehow what others there were feeling– if there could be
communication on this one little thing. Huge thing.

They didn't want to know, and they
didn't even hear. And Gimel had grown cowed and nervous. Altogether he was sad,
through and through.

Then, in his next sleep, Beth felt Fluid
Drive drinking his mindsoul. Their imaginary tongues wrapped together, an
infinite kiss, until he was a vibration the fluid drive drank. It swallowed
long, then stopped, relinquishing just a drop of mercurial memory.

He remembered himself, faintly at first.
Then fear shot into his stomach. Fluid Drive knew.

Beth crept into the waking shift as if
under fire. He anticipated his end. Fluid Drive’s fingers touched his mind and
what was left of him cringed. He had felt virtual wars from the archives; he
had become the turret, the gun, the bullet, the flesh slammed by the bullet
shock. And he waited, day after day in dry mouthed terror for that final moment
in which his soul would be hit and know its obliterating electric pain.

And then, after mornings, days and
nights of fear, it was as if something swept him brutally empty. Brutally,
icily and beautifully empty of clutter. He had won through. A sliver of
himself, drained but determined, repeated simply, “Beth,” and he knew for
certain that Beth could move.

“GIMEL!” Beth yelled. Its echo bounced
to every last space in the hangar. Fluid Drive be hanged. This had to be talked
over, just a little, even if he was going ahead anyway, even if he was caught
and condemned.

“I know at least half your eye is
watching, Gimel, so this is it. I am going to leave here.”

“Going where?” Gimel signaled angrily,
and Beth realized that this could mean the end of a friendship, such as it was.
“Down the hall to the next office? Some kind of infantile protest about
something?”

“No. I'm going out that door over
there.” Beth pointed to the exit door. The door he had seen no one ever go
through. There was something outside this hangar, maybe even outside their
conglomerated cities. He suddenly knew this. That was his compulsion; his
facial tic; his Gimel obsession.

“They'll punish you for it. Probably
take you off this project. They'll make you a labourer or something.”

“No they won't. They'll be grateful.”

“Why the hell would they be grateful to
you? For going out a door?”

“Because I will tell them what's
beyond.”

“They told us all that already”

“When? Centuries ago, millennia. We've
been told and have to shut up about it forever? We know nothing about it today.
So I'm volunteering.”

“Idiot. How you gonna get there? You
can't fly, can barely walk.”

“But I can float, from Coms jack to Coms
jack. There's scores of empty ones between here and the door. And I'll bet that
door has an emergency bar. I can do it.”

“You're nuts,” signaled Gimel and
returned to his work.

Beth floated from empty socket to empty
socket, inventing his path based on simplest opportunity. Even his strong arms
ached each time he fumbled at a new Coms jack, but eagerness drove him. He
pushed off, rested, pushed off again, until finally he arrived at the door. He
listened to the hangar. Still only the fans going whomp whomp. No alarms. And
way back there, Gimel didn't so much as peek. Beth lock-detached his Coms
socket and switched to breathing mode, then did it. He pushed on the panic bar.
The door swung stiffly open, then slammed shut.

Beth was outside, alone, for the moment,
stunned under caged wall lights. A brutal wind battered his naked body,
stinging it with ice pellets that left wounds. All around him was arctic;
white, ice crusted snow and black sky. Beth rolled into what cover he could
find, a shallow snowdrift. But it did no good. He could feel the last of his
warmth sucked from him by the frigid cold. He splayed in the snowdrift, trying
to approximate a swimming stroke. His natural buoyancy would have been a boon
in water. Now, his tubular body simply slid haphazard inches, pushed by the
wind, and his legs and arms splayed and rowed with no purchase. With every
second he felt more of his gut freeze; felt his meagre energy die away.

He grabbed with his fingers and dug his
toes in behind. His lungs clawing in oxygen, Beth's fingers and toes loosened
him from the snow trap. He had only moved forward mere inches, but more of this
and he might reach the hangar again. He dug and pushed until he had covered a
few feet. If he had teeth they would be chattering down to shards.

Then a massive, bullish wind hit him
sideways and he rolled across a series of snow dunes that crowned a deeper
downhill slope. Blown down there, he would never get up again. He would die
down there in the shadows.

A shape formed out of the blizzard – a
shifting, dark mirage at first sight, then a living unknown, so much higher
from ground to top than Beth that his mind froze. His eyes locked on and his
poor limbs locked up, squirming no more against the ice-armoured snow.

It came on until it stood only a
footstep away. What Beth saw he could not name. Like his, it had legs, though
they were tree trunks compared to his lithe flippers. What kind of muscle mass
and physical engineering moved them and carried that huge torso? What kind of
brain hid inside that huge head.

Beth stared feebly at the creature as it
bent close. He smelled its clothing, animal textiles and fur, and smelled its
sweat, and was terrified. His stomach felt a creeping warmth that dissolved as
quickly as it came. He had urinated into the snow.

The giant stood straight and thrust the
butt of his spear into the snow, inches from Beth’s ear.

“Please help me,” Beth cried out. The
bitter wind killed the words.

There was a black sky behind the
whipping snow, obsidian hard. There was snow, forever. And this monster.

The beast looked down once more on Beth,
then spat once, harshly, to the side of Beth’s torso. The spear end stirred,
breaking granules of ice free, and the beast scraped its end in the snow.

The monster growled. “Foetus!”

It stamped beside a circle it had drawn
just above Beth’s head. Beth clamped his eyelids together and his insides
turned to water.

Then he heard the feet crunch on snow,
their sound dying, second by second. He was alone once more and dared open his
eyes. There was the wind, the snow, Beth, a circle and a footprint.

Beth propped himself up on his arms long
enough to inspect the circle in full. He recognized the letter A violently scraped into it. He knew the
symbol. It was an old symbol, a human symbol. It meant ‘Anarchy.’

Beth fought himself out of another dip
into sleep. Each time it happened, sleep became stronger quicksand. He knew he
would die if he could do no more than wait.

He dug furiously with his hands until he
found what he wanted. Roots. Roots to act like hooks. He strained with his
numbed arms, his body spasmodic in the frigid wind. Finally he broke loose a
handful of the stronger pieces and, holding a few in each hand, stabbed them
into the snow and began to drag himself away from the slope and closer to the
hangar. Digging with stiff arms, his hooks rooted deep, he hauled himself away
from the worst of the wind and up to the relative shelter of the hangar wall.

He tucked himself against the exit door
and gasped and stuttered madly from the cold. He banged his roots against the
door, little bumps no one inside would hear over the fans, and out here, over
the wind howling and pummeling. It was disheartening enough to bring tears. He
threw his roots away and cuddled up to the door, pushing on the metal with his
hands and head. Then suddenly he was stuck. His hands would not come apart from
the metal and his forehead remained glued. How had this happened? Was there some
kind of magnetism to the walls? Who else had come out here and ended like this?
Disbelief bred panic and he wrenched and wrenched at his hands until he drew
blood and found them stuck in another position.

Eventually one bloodied hand came free
and Beth punched the door with his knuckles, slam, slam, slam. The wind mocked
him. Minutes passed, and he kept lifting his bloodied fist, slamming, slamming,
until he finally felt reverberations that spoke of some kind of activity
inside. Someone must have heard him. He punched some more until finally the
door swung open and the interior heat bathed him like a balm.

Hand-held heaters were aimed at his face
and hand until he was free. Then he was upturned, gripped firmly by arms and
legs and carried across the hangar at speed. His hands still bled and screamed
where his carriers touched them. He surrendered into black.

Finally, in a small, empty room, his
Coms socket was cleaned and he was hooked up once again to the Fluid Drive. He
felt that familiar mind embrace that always first came with connection. He lay
on a bed, his arms hanging out so as to keep his hands from brushing his body.

“You've been out, I see.”

“Yes, I...”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to explore deeper, to find
something new we could use or...”

“Impossible, here. Earth is arctic. Did
you not understand, the cities are for your protection, your nourishment? The
museums, the memories we give you access to should have told you that.”

Beth said what he thought was the right
thing. “I know that now. I never really paid attention to those details. I just
thought there was something new out there, some thing I could discover, some contribution...And” he confessed
contritely ... “I didn't trust the information we were given. I got bored
and...”

“It happens. But few take the drastic
measures you did. Some, but not many.”

Silence. Beth hung like yesterday's
party balloon, his spirit deflated.

“So what are we going to do with you? We
don't know if you can be trusted...” The voice sounded a patronizing note.

“I'll do anything you assign me to. I
mean it.” Beth thought of prisons he had seen on the Coms encyclopaedic
databases. Would they imprison him for this?

“Dirty work? What you might call stupid
work? After all, there must be some punishment, some reminder of your foolish
behaviour.”

“Yes.” Beth was humble but relieved.
Work beat prison any day.

“Then we will have you cleaning Coms
sockets. You will do this when your wounds have healed sufficiently. And you
will do it until we decide to release you from this demeaning labour and
perhaps use your creative mind again. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Thank you. I am grateful.”

So Beth's hands and skin improved until
he was ready to work, and every day when awoken he fed briefly from the Coms
connection in his room, then strapped on the vacuum and miniature water-hose
and, floating through the hangar, followed the lines of workers, discovering
unused Coms sockets and cleaning them thoroughly, and occasionally cleaning
Coms sockets causing trouble for their users. He saw Gimel in passing now and
again but dared not speak to him. He kept silence, but for the occasional “You're welcome,” if some worker were kind
enough to thank him for the servicing.

Then, a whistle came high and piercing
across the hangar and Beth smiled. It could be no one else. He looked across
and Gimel was beckoning him. Beth was at his side in seconds. Gimel whispered.

“I've got something for you. Something
you can't forget.”

Beth laughed. They were going to be
friends again, he knew it.

Gimel held out his shortened right hand
and Beth realized he had never truly looked at it before. He had not looked at
a lot of things, it seemed. Gimel's hand was missing three fingers on one hand
and old scars striped his palm. Beth recalled his daily struggles with the Coms
socket. Then the obvious hit him hard.

“You went...?”

“Just over five years ago. Frostbite. It
was frozen over out there then too. Always has been. Always will be, they say.”

“I'm sorry” said Beth.

“Never mind. It will mend,” said Gimel.

“Your scars?"

"No. Your brief delusion. Then
you will be back beside me again.”

“You sure?”

“I asked them to put me back next to you
and mentor you. You, in turn, will mentor someone else. In time. ”

Gimel’s face became furtive for a
second. He clamped his mouth shut meaningfully, then, back turned to the
nearest camera, finger signalled Beth to float closer and LOOK. He held up his
left palm as Beth floated in. On it, Beth made out the old pink scar – a circle
with a letter A sliced violently into it. He gasped.

“Clean the Coms socket... please,” said
Gimel. Then he whispered as Beth worked. “Did you ever notice, we have not ever
named one person here Aleph? No Alpha. No equivalent. No Omega either. No
opening or closing the circle.”

“No, I never thought...”

“Aleph, Alpha... beginnings, absolute
beginnings. Even only as language, that is potent.”

“And your Notion of Motion. We’ve almost
all had it, all whispered it.”

Beth suddenly felt hopeless. He wanted
to cry.

Gimel touched one of his eyes with a
gentle finger.

“No tears.” He smiled and showed his
Anarchy scar again. “You wanted to be Aleph, Alpha. You wanted what we all
want. What we are waiting for, silently.”

“Except you. You talk all the time
Gimel.”

“That’s my tic. My revolt. They’ve quit
punishing me for it. They think, instead, that they will get secrets from me.
That I will entice the others to talk, one by one. They want a Tower of Babel.”

“They want us to talk?”

“If, through that, we will slip up,
yes.”

“Slip up?”

Gimel clamped his mouth shut and finger
signalled. “Give away our unity. We are already of one mind, and we have
learned to keep it from them. We are, out of necessity, schizoid. We give Fluid
Drive access to what we want to share. Meanwhile, we plan, and we wait.”

“For what?”

“For Aleph and Omega. For the moment
when the circle finds its ends, and joins. Our minds will know it before Fluid
knows. We will see them and name them.”

Beth saw it in beautiful crimson in his
mind, and then again in the faded pink of Gimel’s palm. Anarchy. Its chaos
would set them free at last.

He would keep the silence. He would
wait.

He remembered Fluid’s sucking kiss, and
his survival.

Gimel smiled. “I know. It has happened
to all of us. Right before we go nuts. You’re okay Beth. You’re not the Aleph,
but you’re alright.”

Profezzer:
This is a prequel of sorts to a much larger drama that happens a couple thousand years in the future. The Olafson saga is as good as any I have read and ranks up there with some greats in terms of plot and the construction of her universe. Her one detraction is spelling and punctuation but do n...

Remini UDA:
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snowview03:
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TheProfezzer:
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SandraHan1:
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Mark-Mikkel:
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borkarprasad:
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PaulSenkel:
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rafajogosmmo:
If the second book was not free I would buy it even if I am poor, the book got me hocked all the way to the finish. I hope the second one lives up to the first, I really do.The only problem that I had with the book is that it is a bit confusing to know the side characters, I would get confused be...

Hawkebat:
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